You applied on a Tuesday.
Maybe you tailored the resume, agonized over a cover letter that made you sound as capable as you believe you are, and got the auto-reply thanking you for your interest in joining the team.
Then nothing.
Three weeks later the listing was back at the top of the board, posted fresh that morning, same title, same company, same paragraph about a self-starter thriving in a fast-paced environment.
Here is the thing I do not have the answer for — the thing nobody outside that company can tell you — and the reason I wanted to write it down. I do not know whether that job was ever real. No law in this country requires anyone to say.
But Maryland is different in one respect only. We know almost exactly how many people are out there answering those listings right now, and we know what they used to do for a living.
The thirty thousand
Three agencies have counted Maryland’s federal job losses. They use different methods and different windows, so take all three.
The Maryland Department of Labor, working from state employment estimates, reports federal employment in Maryland down 31,100 jobs between January 2025 and January 2026, with total nonfarm employment down 49,300 over those same twelve months. The Comptroller’s office, counting federal jobs physically located in the state, puts the loss at 29,300 between January 2025 and March 2026, an 18 percent cut to federal employment in Maryland and, in raw numbers, the steepest of any state except California. And the Comptroller’s January scenario report, drawing on BLS and Maryland Department of Labor data, puts the loss at an estimated 24,900 over the first eleven months of 2025 alone, roughly 15 percent of every federal job in the state, with 10,300 of those falling in October and November.
The numbers differ but the direction does not. For scale: the last time the federal government cut this way, during sequestration, the Comptroller counts about 8,000 federal jobs lost across 2013 and 2014.
So we have to understand what those people did for a living.
That same report, produced with the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, counted roughly 229,000 Maryland residents working federal civilian jobs, not counting active-duty service members, whether the desk sits in Maryland, the District, or Virginia. Federal jobs physically located in Maryland account for about 6 percent of the state’s employment and 10 percent of its wages. For the roughly 158,000 federal jobs physically located in the state, the average salary was $126,468 against a Maryland private-sector average of $73,174, the largest federal-to-private gap of any state in the region. Three quarters of those jobs paid more than $100,000, against 42 percent of federal jobs nationally, and about 31 percent paid more than $150,000.
In the Sixth District, this is Fort Detrick’s story. In federal fiscal year 2023 there were 4,726 federal civilian jobs located in Frederick County and 9,178 federal employees living there. Defense was the largest employer of Frederick County residents at roughly 2,667, and Health and Human Services second at nearly 1,900. Of the $1.8 billion in federal contracts awarded in 2024 for work originating in Frederick County, more than half came from HHS rather than Defense, supporting the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and the Integrated Research Facility. Only Montgomery and Baltimore counties drew more HHS contract money. HHS is the agency that has absorbed the deepest cuts.
The usual landing spot for a laid-off federal worker is a federal contractor. That door is closing too. Estimated corporate income tax payments from Maryland federal contractors are down roughly 60 percent year over year, according to the state’s Board of Revenue Estimates.
The Comptroller’s researchers also did something most economic reports skip. Across three sessions in March and June of 2025 they sat down with former EPA, HHS, SBA, Treasury, and USAID employees and asked what came next. Nearly all said they would look for work. Most were bracing for a long and difficult search, and expected to take a pay cut of 10 to 25 percent, because federal salaries run well above what nonprofits and state government pay for comparable roles.
They were right to brace.
One thing about that roundtable is worth saying plainly. The participants lived in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties, and in Baltimore City. Not one of them was from Frederick, Washington, Allegany, or Garrett. The most careful look anyone has taken at what happens to a laid-off Maryland federal worker did not include Western Maryland.
The market they landed in
Job openings are not scarce.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported openings little changed at 7.4 million in June, an openings rate of 4.4 percent. On paper there is roughly one advertised position for every unemployed person in the country.
Hiring is what stalled.
The hires rate, which measures gross hiring as a share of employment and is the number labor economists actually watch, sat at 3.4 percent in June. Quits held at 2.0 percent and layoffs at 1.1 percent. Bruce Fallick, a senior vice president at the Cleveland Fed, noted in an August 4 commentary that the hiring rate now runs below where it stood during the strong expansions of the 2000s and 2010s. Economists call this low-hire, low-fire.
Translated: almost nobody is getting fired, almost nobody is getting hired, and if you are outside that you are outside it for a long time.
Jerome Powell said as much from the chair of the Federal Reserve. At his April 29 press conference, weeks before his term ended, he described a labor market in an uncomfortable kind of balance, one where “people who don’t have jobs will have a hard time breaking in.”
Nationally, payrolls fell by 23,000 in July. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1 percent while 6.9 million people remained unemployed. Labor force participation sat at 61.4 percent, down seven-tenths of a point since January. There are 5.9 million people outside the labor force who say they want a job, and 476,000 discouraged workers, meaning people who have concluded no job is available for them at all. Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote the morning the report landed that the unemployment rate had fallen for the wrong reasons, with participation at its lowest since February 2021.
Painfully for me and many others, it is worse than the average. Job openings in the information sector, which covers most of the technology and data work that federal IT and contracting people are qualified for, fell 33 percent year over year, the steepest decline of any private sector.
And then there is the line in the June JOLTS release that nobody picked up. Job openings in the federal government rose by 39,000 that month. Federal hires fell by 6,000.
More federal listings. Fewer federal hires. Same month, same dataset, same employer that put thirty thousand Marylanders on the street.
The silence
Now add what happens after you hit submit.
Ashby, a recruiting software company, analyzed more than a hundred million applications across two hundred thousand jobs over five years and reported in May that applications per hire have tripled since 2021, with roles now drawing more than three hundred applications for every hire made. Its data also shows candidates are roughly half as likely to reach the interview stage as five years ago.
Half as likely.
Ashby’s platform skews toward technology and startup employers, so read those figures as a picture of that market rather than of the whole economy. But still.
Employers responded the only way arithmetic allows. They automated the top of the funnel.
The result is that silence has become uninterpretable. When you hear nothing back, you cannot distinguish among three entirely different events: the posting was never a real job, an algorithm scored you out before a person saw your name, or a human read your resume and passed. A vendor survey of just over a thousand American job seekers this April found half had been rejected at least once in the past year without a word from any human, and fewer than one in ten had ever been told plainly that AI was involved in evaluating them. We should treat the exact percentages with the skepticism any vendor survey deserves. Yet the direction is not seriously in dispute.
Three causes, one indistinguishable outcome. Hold onto that. The question worth asking is which of the three you are ever allowed to find out.
Why the listing stays up
What is a job posting actually for?
It has become several products wearing the same coat. Sometimes it is a real vacancy with a funded req and a hiring manager who wants to fill it. Sometimes it is pipeline construction, a resume vacuum for a role that might get budgeted in two quarters. Sometimes it is optics, because an active careers page tells investors and competitors that the company is growing. Sometimes it is compliance, because the internal candidate was picked in March and policy requires a public posting anyway. And sometimes, according to recruiters answering industry surveys, the listing exists so the person currently doing that job can see their own role advertised and understand that they are replaceable.
If you’re sitting there thinking several of those are fucking ridiculous, you’re not wrong.
A caveat I want to be explicit about, because I am going to spend the next section attacking these same surveys. Employer self-report surveys are worthless for telling you how often ghost postings happen. They are useful for telling you what mechanisms exist, because the people describing the practice are describing their own workplaces. Take them as a catalog of what is possible. Do not take them as a measurement.
Then there is the part that belongs in the surveillance conversation rather than the labor one. Every application is a package of personal data submitted voluntarily: full employment history, education, address, phone, salary expectations, sometimes demographic information, sometimes a background check authorization. A posting that never becomes a job is still an efficient data collection instrument, and the person filling it out has no idea collection was the point. (Now you do).
I can’t take credit for that framing. Daniel J. Grimm argued it in the Columbia Law Review Forum last November: the central wrong of ghost jobs is the privacy harm, because applicants surrender detailed personal data in exchange for a chance at employment that does not exist, which means the consent they gave was induced by deception and was never informed consent at all.
Let’s parse that again: the consent you give when you apply for a job that you don’t know isn’t real was deceitful, so you can’t have actually consented.
Grimm, now deputy general counsel at a Chicago trading firm, previously served as senior counsel to the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and has published on data-privacy enforcement. He argues the practice violates the Federal Trade Commission Act and lays out a roadmap for the FTC to act on it.
Pennsylvania’s legislators appear to have reached the same conclusion. Their proposed Ghost Job Postings Prevention Act would bar employers from mining or selling applicant data or retaining it beyond a year, require disclosure of how far artificial intelligence reaches into hiring, and require every posting to state how many times that same position has been advertised in the prior year.
That’s tremendous progress, but it’s one fucking state.
The objection, which is a good one
Here is where I have to be careful, because the version of this story circulating online is largely garbage and it would be dishonest of me to fuel it any further.
Most viral statistics in this space come from resume companies and staffing platforms surveying employers about their own behavior and publishing the results as marketing. The figures range from one in seven to nearly half depending on whose blog you land on. That range is not a finding. One exception deserves naming: the one-in-seven number came from a review of 175,000 live listings on Indeed rather than from asking employers to describe themselves, which makes it methodologically different from most of what surrounds it, even though the firm that produced it is a lender with its own interests.
There are also three real arguments against the thesis, and it’s worth naming them.
The first is mechanical, and it comes from the Congressional Research Service rather than from industry. Ghost postings can result from third parties, including online job boards that automatically copy listings from other websites, so an employer who fills a role and takes down its own posting may have no idea the listing lives on elsewhere. The repost you are staring at may not be the employer’s act at all. It’s a problem that should be fixed, but we can’t blame the employer in this instance.
The second is operational. A great deal of what looks like bad faith is ordinary dysfunction. Stacey Bastone, a Jackson Lewis attorney who advises employers, put the case directly to Bloomberg Law: there are legitimate reasons to build a pipeline, roles get approved and then paused, headcount requirements change, budgets change.
Legal recruiters interviewed by the ABA Journal in January described the same thing from inside the process. Succession-planning postings that build a pipeline before a partner retires. Postings that go up when a project is approved and then stall when the funding slips a budget cycle. Those recruiters also said ghost listings show up less often in legal hiring than the discourse assumes, and that when they do appear they are usually accidental rather than strategic.
Some postings are legally compelled on top of that. Federal contractors face affirmative posting obligations, and the PERM labor certification process requires employers to advertise roles publicly even when the intended hire is already identified, a conflict one immigration firm flagged when analyzing New York’s bill. A law that treats every stale listing as deception will sweep in a lot of employers who did nothing wrong.
Does this make us feel better? No, not really. But this form of corporate dysfunction is not in bad faith the way other forms may be. There is an argument to be made that Corporate America’s endemic sloppiness is symptomatic of larger issues in our economy that exploit workers and consumers. But that’s an entire story within itself.
The third is empirical and it is the strongest. Indeed’s Job Postings Index tracks JOLTS openings closely, both hovering near their pre-pandemic levels. If phantom listings were exploding, you would expect advertised postings to diverge from the government’s measured openings. They have not. And Fallick argues the whole configuration reflects a long-term downtrend in labor market fluidity traceable to at least the mid-1990s and possibly the early 1980s, with roughly half attributable to an aging and more educated population. He is describing what he considers a relatively healthy labor market.
Every one of those arguments has force. Two of them may well be right (unfortunately). Which brings me to the part of this that actually matters.
What nobody can tell you
Here is the honest conclusion when you look at the evidence: nobody knows how many job postings are real.
Nobody.
That is not my characterization. It is the Congressional Research Service’s. Congress’s own research arm reported that the prevalence of ghost postings is difficult to quantify because no official government data tracks it.
Not the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which counts openings by asking employers a survey question and takes the answer. Not the Maryland Department of Labor, which enforces what a posting must say about pay and has no authority over whether the job exists. Not the job boards, which have no obligation to verify anything they list. Not the Comptroller, whose researchers can model the economic impact of thirty thousand lost jobs but cannot tell those workers which of the listings they are answering are genuine.
Not me. I hoped I would find an answer in writing this. I did not. And that is not a gap in the reporting. It’s just the finding.
Notice what just happened in the section above. I laid out three serious arguments that ghost postings are rarer and more accidental than people think, and I cannot rebut any of them, but I also cannot confirm them. Go back and look at what they actually rest on. A job-board index. An economist’s read of forty-year trends. Practitioners describing their own industries from memory. Not one of those is a count.
Nobody on either side of this argument has a count, because no one has ever been required to produce one.
So of the three reasons you never heard back, I can tell you two are real and large. Automated screening is documented. Human rejection is the ordinary condition of a hard market. The third one, the posting that was never a job, is the one where the honest answer is that its size is unknown and unknowable under current law. That is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to require it be counted.
Every number you have ever seen about ghost jobs comes from a vendor because there is nothing else to count. There is no disclosure requirement, so there is no dataset, so there is no measurement, so there is no accountability, so there is no pressure to change. The absence of evidence here is not evidence of absence. It is the predictable output of a system where the only party who knows whether a job is real has no obligation to say and no consequence for staying quiet.
Look at what that vacuum does to the debate. In June, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote to the Bureau of Labor Statistics asking whether it had studied the effect of ghost postings on the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and pointed to what he called a persistent 30 percent gap between openings and hires since 2021. Fortune’s coverage rendered the same point as arithmetic: in April, employers reported 7.6 million openings and hired 5.1 million workers, so roughly one in three advertised positions did not produce a hire.
But that arithmetic does not work. Openings in JOLTS are a snapshot of positions unfilled on the last business day of the month. Hires are a running total of everyone added to payrolls across the whole month. Dividing one by the other compares a photograph to a film, and it will always produce a gap whether or not a single phantom listing exists. CRS went further and concluded that JOLTS responses are unlikely to be contaminated by ghost jobs at all, because JOLTS reporting is confidential, and nearly every motive for posting a job you do not intend to fill depends on the posting being seen. That cuts against the senator’s premise, and I am obligated to say so rather than let a convenient number stand.
So a senator is reaching for a broken statistic and a national business magazine is printing it. Not because either is careless. Because there is nothing else there. When you refuse to measure something, people will estimate it badly, and then policy gets made on the estimate.
I cannot prove to you that ghost postings are widespread. I genuinely wished I could when I started researching. But I can prove that no one is required to find out, that Maryland had a chance to build the machinery for finding out and built something narrower instead, and that the record of how that happened is public.
What it costs
A person who applies to sixty real jobs and hears back from four at least learns something. The resume needs work, or the field is saturated, or the salary ask is off. That is painful and it is usable.
A person who applies to sixty listings, some of which may never have been real, some of which were screened by software that never announced itself, learns nothing at all. They cannot separate the signal from the machinery. So they draw the only conclusion available: that the gap on the resume is disqualifying, that the federal experience does not translate, that at fifty-one they are finished.
That last one lands hardest here, because Maryland’s federal workforce skews old. A third of federal employees working in Maryland are 55 or older, against 28 percent nationally, and two thirds hold a bachelor’s degree or better against about half nationally. These are the workers with the most to lose and the least runway to lose it on. That is how you get 476,000 people who have concluded no job exists for them.
Maryland’s aggregate numbers, meanwhile, look fine. The state added 17,800 jobs in the first half of 2026, growing at 0.64 percent against a national rate of 0.35 percent, with labor force participation at 63.9 percent, well above the national 61.5. The Department of Labor’s word for it was resilient. It is a defensible word. It also has nothing to say to a former Fort Detrick contract specialist on month nine.
Recoveries are averages. Averages are where individual people go to disappear.
The loophole
On April 25, 2024, Governor Moore signed Senate Bill 525. Since October 1 of that year, any employer posting a job performed even partly in Maryland must disclose a good-faith wage range and a general description of benefits. The law reaches state, county, and local government as well as private employers. The Commissioner of Labor and Industry investigates and enforces.
So in Maryland, a company advertising a position it has no intention of filling is legally obligated to tell you what it would have paid you. The salary of the imaginary job is regulated. The existence of the job is not.
That is a fucking absurd place for the law to stop. But it stopped there deliberately, and the record shows how.
As introduced, SB 525 contained a private right of action letting applicants sue employers who violated it. On February 22, 2024, the Restaurant Association of Maryland filed written testimony with the Senate Finance Committee opposing the bill. Melvin Thompson, the association’s senior vice president, wrote that the private right of action was a significant concern, would prompt frivolous lawsuits by people with no genuine interest in the advertised jobs, and should be removed, with complaints handled instead by the Department through a letter compelling compliance on a first violation. He attached a docket list from Washington State, where the pay transparency law does allow private suits, to demonstrate the risk.
That attachment is worth looking at, because the association was not making it up. The list runs dozens of cases, and a small number of names appear over and over. One plaintiff accounts for roughly seventeen of them, suing Adidas, Safeway, Office Depot, Burberry, Denny’s, and Total Wine among others. Whatever you think of the policy, that is a real pattern and a serious argument about how a private right of action gets used in practice.
The testimony also notes the association had been in touch with the bill’s sponsors about amendment language.
The private right of action came out. Look at what replaced it. Under the enacted law, a first violation gets the employer a letter compelling compliance. A second violation carries a civil penalty of up to $300 for each employee or applicant affected. Subsequent violations, within three years of a prior determination, carry up to $600.
Three hundred dollars. For a second offense. Assessed at the Commissioner’s discretion after a first offense that costs nothing.
I am not telling you the Restaurant Association did something improper. They filed public testimony, made an evidenced argument, and the legislature agreed with them. That is how it is supposed to work. I am telling you that anyone who proposes a Maryland ghost-jobs bill with real teeth in 2027 should read that testimony first, because the counterargument is already written, already tested, and already won once.
What to actually do
Other places have moved, and one has already finished.
Ontario went first, and it is the only jurisdiction on this continent with a law in force. Since January 1, under sections 8.1 through 8.6 of Ontario’s Employment Standards Act and Regulation 476/24, an employer with 25 or more employees must state in every publicly advertised posting whether the job is an existing vacancy, must disclose whether artificial intelligence is used to screen, assess, or select applicants, must include the expected pay, must not demand Canadian experience, must tell every interviewed candidate within 45 days of the last interview whether a decision has been made, and must keep the posting and the applicant communications on file for three years. Internal-only postings, general help-wanted advertising with no specific role, and jobs located outside the province are exempt. The rules come from three statutes stacked together, the Working for Workers Four, Five, and Seven Acts, and the last of those also puts compliance obligations on the job posting platforms themselves.
Unrelated, but given the current back and forth between Premier Doug Ford and President Donald Trump, it is oddly satisfying to give Ontario praise here.
New York’s legislature passed S8877 on June 2, adding a new section 219-b to the state labor law. It requires employers with 100 or more employees, and third-party job posting entities, to state in capital letters and bold type whether the employer intends to fill the position within 90 days and by what date, intends to fill it later than that, or has no current vacancy and is collecting resumes. Listings must come down within two weeks of a position being filled.
The penalties are the part Maryland should study. A violation costs $2,500 for each publication or digital platform where the advertisement appears, escalating for each 30-day period it stays up. Jack Blum, a Polsinelli attorney, ran the arithmetic for SHRM: one noncompliant listing carried on a company’s own page plus LinkedIn plus Indeed is $7,500 immediately, with a further $5,000 per platform if it is not fixed within 30 days of a violation finding. Set that against Maryland’s $300. There is no private right of action in the New York bill either; enforcement runs through Department of Labor audits. And its definition of employer expressly excludes the state, public authorities, and other governmental agencies, which is a carve-out Maryland has already declined to make in its own posting law. The legislative record still shows the bill returned to the Senate rather than delivered to the Governor, which is normal in Albany; New York often transmits bills in batches late in the year.
Pennsylvania’s version is the most demanding of the state bills. House Bill 2321 was introduced March 26 by Representative Jim Prokopiak with eighteen co-sponsors and referred the same day to the House Labor and Industry Committee, where it has sat without a hearing or a vote since. It would require employers to identify a posting as existing, anticipated, or new; give an estimated timeframe, intended hire date, and start date; disclose salary range and the extent of any AI use; take listings down within two weeks of a hire; and give status updates to everyone interviewed. Penalties run $1,000 to $5,000 per violation and up to $25,000 per applicant for mining or selling applicant data, and it exempts employers with fewer than fifty. In New Jersey, Senator Paul Moriarty’s S2136 cleared the Senate Labor Committee in May. California and Kentucky have bills of their own, and Kentucky’s first attempt already died once.
There is another point to be made, whether you like it or not. This is not a partisan issue and the record shows it.
In September 2024, Representative Keith Self, a Texas Republican, wrote to the Labor Department urging it to investigate ghost postings after a constituent raised the issue. In June of this year, Senator Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, wrote to Labor, the FTC, and BLS asking whether anyone has studied how common the practice is, whether it constitutes deceptive advertising, whether the agencies have talked to the hiring platforms about listing accuracy, and whether BLS would consider adding a time-to-fill metric to JOLTS.
Both are good letters. But neither is a piece of introduced legislation. Two years after the first one, there is still no federal bill and, as far as I can determine, no answer from any of the four agencies asked.
The mechanism is not mysterious. CRS laid it out: establish requirements for employers and hiring platforms regarding job postings, and specify that violations are treated as violations of Section 5 of the FTC Act. Grimm argues the FTC may already have that authority under existing law. Either route reaches the job boards as well as the employers, which matters because the boards are where reposting happens, and neither requires inventing a new agency.
BLS should take Gallego’s last question seriously and add a time-to-fill measure to JOLTS. It would not catch a phantom listing directly. It would put a number on how long the average advertised job stays advertised, which is the closest thing to a measurement anyone has proposed.
And the federal government should go first on itself. USAJOBS should disclose, on every listing, whether the position is funded, whether an internal candidate has been identified, and the date the agency expects to fill it. In a month when federal job openings rose by 39,000 while federal hires fell by 6,000, the government does not get to demand transparency it will not practice.
Maryland should move in parallel, and the General Assembly should build on what it already has rather than starting over. The coverage is already right: SB 525 reaches public and private employers alike, and a ghost-jobs bill should inherit that rather than copy New York’s government carve-out. What has to be added is disclosure of hiring intent and a fill window, a takedown requirement once the position is filled, coverage that reaches job boards and not only employers, limits on retention and sale of applicant data, and disclosure of how far automated screening reaches into the decision.
Enforcement is where the real argument is, and the honest thing is to concede the Restaurant Association’s point and design around it rather than pretend it away. A notice-and-cure period before any private suit. Standing limited to people who actually applied. Penalties that scale with the number of postings rather than the number of plaintiffs.
What is not defensible is another three hundred dollars.
But here is the brutally honest take that I have to write in conclusion: none of this fixes the labor market. A disclosure law will not create a single job. What it does is smaller and more important, and Ontario has already shown the shape of it. Require an employer to say whether the job is real and whether a machine read the application, and two of the three reasons you never heard back stop being mysteries. The third one, that a person read your resume and passed, is the only one that was ever supposed to be the answer.
Someone who has sent out over two hundred applications since September is owed the ability to tell which is which.
If that seems oddly specific and personal, it is. That someone is me.
Sources
Every claim above links to its source inline. This list groups them, and flags what to watch for in a few of them.
Primary government data
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, June 2026
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation, July 2026
Comptroller of Maryland and the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business, Impact of Federal Government Spending and Jobs on the Maryland Economy, June 2025 — 229,000 residents and the 6 and 10 percent figures at p. 5; the 160,000 jobs-located caveat at p. 9; salaries at Figure 3 and Appendix C p. 60; salary distribution at Figure 4; age and education at Figures 5 and 6; sequestration at p. 6; Frederick County at Figure 10 and Appendix C p. 64; HHS contract awards at Figure 41; worker roundtables at p. 24, sessions held March 21, March 25, and June 5, 2025
Comptroller of Maryland and the Smith School, Scenario Analysis of Federal Agency Spending and Jobs Cuts, January 2026 — 24,900 jobs lost January through November 2025, at p. 3
Maryland Department of Labor, January 2026 jobs report and June 2026 jobs report
Maryland Department of Labor, Wage Range Transparency guidance
Bruce Fallick, The “Low-Hire, Low-Fire” Labor Market, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, August 4, 2026 — also the source for the Powell quotation, which Fallick takes from the April 29, 2026 FOMC press conference
Ben Seigel and Annie Alexander, Federal government cuts are testing Maryland’s economic resilience, Brookings, June 16, 2026 — both authors work for the Comptroller. Note the piece gives 29,300 jobs lost January 2025 to March 2026 in one passage and 29,200 for January 2025 to April 2026 in another; the March window is used here
Legislation, testimony, and official correspondence
Maryland Senate Bill 525 (2024), Chapter 272 as enacted — penalty schedule: compliance letter for a first violation, up to $300 per affected applicant for a second, up to $600 for subsequent violations within three years
Restaurant Association of Maryland, written testimony on SB 525, Senate Finance Committee, February 22, 2024
New York State Senate, Bill S8877, Sen. Michael Gianaris
Pennsylvania House Bill 2321, Printer’s No. 3096
Ontario, Requirements related to publicly advertised job postings, Employment Standards Act
U.S. Congressional Research Service, “Ghost” Job Postings, In Focus IF12977, April 25, 2025
Office of Sen. Ruben Gallego, letters to Labor, the FTC, and BLS, June 18, 2026
Office of Rep. Keith Self, letter to the Labor Department, September 27, 2024
Legal and academic
Daniel J. Grimm, Ghost Jobs, Columbia Law Review Forum, Vol. 125, November 13, 2025
Fisher Phillips and Gibney, Anthony & Flaherty on S8877’s enforcement design and its conflict with PERM labor certification
SHRM, quoting Jack Blum of Polsinelli on how the New York penalties compound
Press and industry
Bloomberg Law, quoting Stacey A. Bastone of Jackson Lewis — note this article calls the New York Assembly the “state House”
ABA Journal on ghost listings in legal hiring
CNBC on the July jobs report
Forbes — note this piece misnames Sen. Gianaris as “Mark,” and gives Kentucky’s bill as HB324 where other trackers say HB342
Indeed Hiring Lab and Ashby — Ashby’s platform skews toward technology employers
Enhancv — a vendor survey, treated as such above
